Excellent Ideas

Whether you work for a non-profit, volunteer with one, or sit on a board of directors, obtaining funding is always key to organizational success. Although there are numerous community, corporate, government and even educational grants available, many people pass on the opportunity because they don’t know how to navigate the grant process. Following is a primer to help your organization get organized and start taking advantage of the grand funding out there.Finding opportunitiesThe fi...

You’ve been tasked with making a presentation on some important business figures – financial updates, results of marketing efforts or other key data – and rather than create text-heavy slides with lists of numbers, you know that putting the data into a graphical format will be more interesting and visually appealing to your audience. When used properly, charts and graphs are a very effective way to communicate data. However, simple missteps in design can muddle your data, weake...

I recently attended a webinar covering the subject of asking powerful sales questions. The topic is timely, as current business thinking teaches that every team member is in sales, no matter the person’s job description or title. An example I often hear comes from managers at construction firms who explain their customers keep coming back because of a certain project manager or foreman they can trust to get the job done. Every person who comes into contact with customers represents the bes...

I recently attended a seminar on knowledge management. The session started with the trainer asking us to identify what we know that others may not within our organization. Interesting question. She went on to share that the old paradigm was to hoard power. Those who had knowledge, had the power. But, that mindset has shifted. In today’s society, the way to gain power (or customers, members, market share, followers and loyalty/trust) is to share knowledge. So what is knowledge ma...

I recently sat in on a webinar that was advertised as a crash course in how to calculate the business value of an online community. Although the webinar ended up being an over-the-top pitch for a software company, I did glean the following stats from my time staring at my computer screen: 92% of community leaders believe their online communities have an impact on their business. 35% lack meaningful metrics to report success in business terms. 85% of companies struggle to make decisions because t...

A positive and welcoming culture can mean the difference between an organization that is engaged and growing and one that is stagnant and not succeeding. In a Columbia Business School survey, nearly 2,000 CEOs and CFOs revealed that culture affects profitability, decision-making and even ethical behavior by employees. It's clear that the culture, or values, of your organization can have either a positive or negative impact. But how can you increase the positivity of your culture? Here are so...

Instagram was once considered the place where kids shared funny photos and to others it was thought of as that illusive “other” social media. The image-based social network can be intimidating to those who are used to text-heavy Facebook, but it is a mainstream network with many advantages. From a marketing standpoint, Instagram offers organizations a unique opportunity to diversify the ways in which prospective and current customers or members view a product. The popularity and adva...

Each year, dictionary.com names a word of the year characterizing a cultural theme for the previous 12 months. Perhaps it comes as no surprise the word for 2018 is “misinformation.” Defined as “false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead,” misinformation and its more menacing cousin “fake news” pose serious challenges to everyone who live and communicate in the Information Age.For news media and journalists, the challenge...

Your organization’s website is a great tool to control the narrative and market to potential members and customers. Don’t waste that opportunity with a website that doesn’t clearly lay out your mission or doesn’t allow users to access it on multiple devices. A recent webinar by Protech Associates – the leading provider of cloud-based association management software - unveiled the most common website complaints made by your association’s members and how to fix ...

With readers’ attention spans getting shorter, an increasingly popular way of delivering written content is to break it down into a listicle (listicle = list + article). Listicles, with their numbered or bulleted format, present information in a hierarchical way and are easy for readers to quickly digest.People like listicles because they offer a distillation of the most important points from a larger body of work. To this end, the reader must have confidence that the larger body of work i...

Regardless of your area of study in school or title in your current position, we are all marketers.

Today’s global economy, high-tech business world and ever-changing business environment littered with buzzwords mandate a lifelong journey of education. As experts in marketing, communication, public relations and technical writing, the AOE Team is dedicated to helping you better hone your craft and serve your organization. Through industry workshops and seminars, columns in a variety of trade publications and other educational resources, we offer a variety of educational venues to assist you in your short- and long-term marketing objectives.